


You Begin At The Ending

by hudson



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Break Up, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-31
Updated: 2011-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hudson/pseuds/hudson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rise and fall of a relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Begin At The Ending

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal 1-10-2007. Written during Season 3, so has definitely been Jossed and is thus AUish.

**Title:** You Begin At The Ending  
 **Rating:** PG  
 **Category:** Really it’s gen with a bit of het, and heaps of angst.  
 **Characters:** Michael, Sara (some Michael/Sara), others  
 **pbfic_exchange2 fic requested by:** happywriter06  
 **Summary:** The rise and fall of a relationship.  
 **Word Count:** 3,846  
 **Disclaimer:** Paul Scheuring and a whole lot of other people who aren’t me own Prison Break.  
 **Prompt:** 086: Choices  
 **A/N:** happywriter06 requested post escape Michael and Sara gen – I got a little away from that, but it's not exactly het, and it's not a love story.

-

They existed in a vacuum for the first few weeks; a honeymoon-like state of “nothing can possibly touch us now” and lived as if things would stay like that forever. They had life, they had money, they had each other, and it was easy at first to sweep everything else under the rug of “but we _survived._ ” Because they had.

A week after reaching Panama he asked her to marry him. They were standing on a beach, staring out at the setting sun turning the horizon a bright pink and it seemed the right thing to do – the perfect thing – so he fell to his knees before her with the euphoric taste of freedom on his tongue and whispered, “marry me?”

She gaped at him open-mouthed, and he felt his stomach drop as those brief seconds of silence stretched on infinitely and his mind raced with _but this is how it’s supposed to be! She’s supposed to say **yes!**_

And then she did; eyes filled with tears and voice just barely a whisper she said, “yes” and pulled him to his feet and they wrapped around each other and he began planning his happily-ever-after future with her.

Happily-ever-after lasted through the wedding – a simple occasion one afternoon, again on the beach, all those in attendance barefoot save Michael.

Lincoln quietly watched Michael get dressed in the hours before, saying little as his brother buzzed around the room animatedly, manically, until finally he stood with his hands on Michael’s shoulders and stared hard at his brother’s eyes.

He asked quietly, “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

Michael blinked rapidly and regarded his brother curiously. “Of course,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face.

Lincoln continued to stare, then nodded and backed away, allowing his brother free reign to make any decisions he wanted or needed to.

Michael gave him another smile and said, “it’s going to be beautiful.”

Lincoln nodded again and twisted his lips up into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

And it _was_ beautiful. It was gorgeous and warm and sunny and everyone looked happy. Lincoln smiled and Sucre cheered. C-Note ( _Benjamin,_ Benjamin now) patted him on the back, and Sara blushed when Maricruz gushed over her dress – a long white one that she picked up at a flea market several days prior that made it look as if she was floating when she walked across the sand and the wind blew the material around her feet.

He looked in her eyes as they read their vows, watched as she bit her lip and smiled softly, and he thought _yes, this is right_ as butterflies danced in his stomach and he said, “I do.”

They hired a local man to play guitar and sing after the ceremony was over, soft Spanish tunes that most of them couldn’t understand but it would later be agreed were perfect for the setting and the moment. They danced, the small group of them, while Lincoln and L.J. sat on the periphery and watched, exchanging knowing looks that Michael realized all too suddenly he no longer understood.

He watched his family and felt Sara shift against him and sigh as they swayed together and music drifted through the air around them. She rested her head on his shoulder and he felt the first few drops of wetness hit his neck where her face was pressed.

“I wish my dad could’ve been here,” she said softly.

He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that, so he pretended to believe it was a trick of the wind, air playing with the music and making things sound less than perfect.

Their first real fight didn’t come until almost two weeks later. There had been endless muted grumbles and feigned smiles and a “…no, no that’s okay” once or twice, but that was to be expected as they set up their new house, and Michael considered it no small victory and an indication of their so-far-successful marriage that they hadn’t yet come to blows despite how often she forgot to wash the dishes in the sink and left Spanish-language magazines that neither of them could read yet lying around the house. She hadn’t been joking, he’d quickly found out, when she’d mentioned all those months ago that she was a packrat, and he couldn’t take clutter; even a small mess made his brain hum uncomfortably and his eyes swarm, and he would never, ever admit how much he missed living with Lincoln in those moments.

His brother knew how much it meant to him to put all the groceries away as soon as they were in the door.

Michael spent much of that time ignoring Lincoln’s quiet judgment, ignoring L.J.’s sad eyes and half-formed smiles, ignoring the air of confusion and uncertainty that lingered throughout his brother’s house along with the perpetual state of grief that his family seemed to live in, unsure of what else he could do for them now. Planning was his forte, constructing and shaping his knack, but he had no clue about the inner workings of emotion and pain.

Perhaps if he had, Michael would have seen the fight with her building and been able to stop it before it truly erupted.

She was cleaning. And for that, he was grateful. But in her straightening up, she seemed to catch a sudden burst of restlessness disguised as inspiration, and when he returned from his lunch with Lincoln, Michael nearly tripped over a footstool that wasn’t in the spot it currently rested when he’d left that morning.

It went far beyond the relocated footstool – everything had been put together, it was in order, they’d decided on the setup of the living room days ago and he knew exactly where everything was.

Or, where everything had been.

The room was chaos to him now, making his head spin and his eyes water. He wanted to kick things, close his eyes and have the couch returned to its place beneath the window and the bookshelf back to the wall beside the stairs and the rug moved back to the center of the floor; open his eyes to order and what he knew.

It made him panicky. He took it out on her.

She was confused, just didn’t _get_ it. She took it out on him.

“You don’t think the coffee table looked better over there?” he asked, not really a question, pointing across the room to its original, rightful place. He tried to mask his displeasure with innocence; surely she wouldn’t notice and would agree that things should be moved back to how they were before.

Sara glanced around the room and then back at her husband. “Nah, I kind of like it better like this,” she said just as innocently.

“But we had it set, it was – I knew where everything was.” Michael raised his voice just a touch.

“Well, you’ll learn where everything is again,” Sara shrugged, turning away. “It’s not like you’re blind, Michael.”

“But it’s – I… Sara, I _can’t_ just relearn it,” he admitted, a rare moment of openness. “It – this is _hard._ ” He closed his eyes against the influx of new stimuli in a place that was supposed to be calm and orderly and never changing.

“I know it is, Michael,” she said gently, turning back to cup a hand around his jaw. “But I just felt like trying something else out. Why can’t you just be a little more patient and _try_ it at least before getting mad?”

“I’m not mad!” he barked, taking a step back, out of her touch. “You just don’t understand how frustrating this is!”

“You’re not mad,” she stated disbelievingly, her voice riding the edge of seething. “Michael, you get angry with me for this little stuff _constantly._ You just talk down to me when you think you’re being reasonable.”

“Sara – ”

“I’m a grown woman, Michael, and this is my house too. I know you don’t like it, but it’s not the end of the world if I leave a book out of place once in a while.”

“It’s not just once in a while!” he burst, knowing it was a mistake even as the words rushed forward from his mouth. “You do it constantly!”

They bickered about nothing, went back and forth for an hour before she stormed out of the house, slamming the screen door angrily against the frame, and he tried to storm into the kitchen to wash the dishes but stumbled again on the corner of the footstool. He spun around and gave it a mighty kick, sending it skidding across the floor, and limped into the kitchen on bruised toes thinking, _wonder how she’ll like the stool over **there.**_

Time and space away from one another smoothed ruffled feathers, and Michael went to bed that evening with his arm along around Sara’s waist and a sense of security; the feeling that having survived their first fight, they would be okay from here on out. Happily-ever-after lasted through their first fight.

It wouldn’t survive their second.

They were just over a month into their marriage, six weeks immersed in the freedom of Panama, and the exhilaration had begun to seep away from Michael. He looked around himself with what felt like new eyes, finally taking in the ache of his brother and the desperate sadness of his nephew, and wondered if they’d ever even been tricked by the excitement of freedom into thinking that they were happy like he had been, or if they had wandered around aimlessly this way, like empty shells, the whole time they had been in Panama.

He finally began to notice the sharp edge Sara was taking on, one he was sure was never there before the breakout, and how rarely she seemed to smile these days. They all made attempts to learn the language, find work, plan lives that went deeper than “happily-ever-after,” but more and more often Michael began to catch Sara’s sighs of “I’ll never be a doctor again.”

More and more often those sighs were tinged with anguish, and Michael could only look on helplessly, wondering what else he was supposed to do.

They spent many nights quiet, each retreating away from the other by mutual consensus that space was needed, and more often than not Michael found Sara’s eyes hard, carrying something that looked like disappointment when she turned them on him. Especially when he mentioned his brother.

Both were careful never to mention Fox River, skipping uncomfortably around the occasion of their meeting and not-so-conveniently forgetting to ever bring up the events that led them each to this place. The one and only time Kacee asked innocently over dinner, “so, medicine?” Sara froze and Michael immediately switched the subject to DeDe’s new school.

When Lincoln came by their house late one evening with the stench of tequila wafting in the air around him, Michael left Sara in the midst of a brewing argument over placement of the remote control and spent most of the night calming his depressed and angry brother, smoothing the rough edges of sorrow that bubbled up with the help of some cheap alcohol. He sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Lincoln and tried to wade through the inebriation to the pained man behind it to convince him that this was the best thing for all of them, and that they could be happy here if they just worked a little harder for it. He’d even convinced himself of that by the time he’d finished walking Lincoln home.

Upon his return to the house, exhausted and raw, Michael found his wife rearranging the furniture in the living room once again, pulling books from the shelf and dropping them into a pile on the floor in order to move the bookshelf across the room.

“What are you _doing?_ ” he asked, stricken as he watched the precious order and calmness of his home ripped away once more.

“Nothing, Michael,” Sara stated shortly. “I’m not doing anything. Just moving things around a little. How’s Lincoln?”

“He’s fine, it’s not a big deal,” he answered quickly, as usual skipping past the several hours he’d spent talking to his brother. He rarely told Sara about his concerns for Lincoln. “But – why’re you rearranging everything?”

“I just _need_ to, okay?”

“No, no, no you don’t,” he replied, striding quickly across the room and grabbing a book out of her hands before it could be added to the growing mountain of disorganization.

“Yes, I _do,_ ” she insisted, snatching the book away from him and dropping it determinedly on the floor. She stared at him defiantly.

“I don’t understand,” he said, almost a question in the statement as his eyes searched hers for some sort of clarity.

“No, you don’t,” she replied. “You don’t get it at all, and I’m so tired, Michael.” She seemed to say his name much more frequently when she was upset with him, or when things were wrong somehow, and the addition of his name to that sentence made his stomach churn with dread. It was the same feeling he remembered having while watching his mother fade away in the hospital, the same one he had while sitting in the courthouse and listing to the banging gavel seal Lincoln’s (and his, and Sara’s, and so many others’) fate, the same one he had when he watched Lincoln collapse into a heap on the floor, the sounds of Veronica’s death pass softly through the phone.

“Sara…” he tried, wanting to crush that feeling immediately.

“No, you don’t,” she persisted. “You don’t understand at all. You don’t seem to understand how hard this is for me too, how much I want something of my own here, and how impossible it’s been to get that.”

“I – what?”

“There’s nothing for me here, Michael” – the name again, spouted angrily this time – “and I miss my old life and I miss my father and my friends and I miss being a doctor and sometimes I just don’t – I don’t see…”

She fumbled there, and looked away, obviously somewhat ashamed of whatever she was about to say.

So of course, he pressed her to finish the sentence.

“What?” he asked, eyes narrowing.

“Nothing, it’s nothing, just forget it,” she grumbled, turning away to retrieve the books and replace them angrily on the shelf.

“You don’t see _what?_ ” he prompted again, placing a hand on the row of books that she was putting back.

She stopped what she was doing but didn’t turn back to look at him.

“I know he’s your brother, Michael,” she said softly, and the statement of his name carried no less discomfort for him. “And you love him. But have you wondered at all if – if he was worth all this?”

He stared at her for a long time, unable to really comprehend her words – he was Lincoln, he was Michael’s brother, he was _innocent;_ of _course_ he was worth it. The question was absurd. What happened as a result of their escape hurt him, opened deep wounds on his soul that he was sure would never heal; only grow and gape and maybe scar later to be constant reminders of the people who had been lost and hurt along the way. But all of that was because of Those People who put Lincoln in prison in the first place. He took direct responsibility for the deaths of some of those he led from the prison, but it was Their fault that anyone was even in the position of escape and, subsequently, death.

“Yes,” he answered quietly, determinedly after a few minutes. “Yes, he was. It was worth it. I’d do it all again if I had to.”

Her eyes widened at that and her mouth fell open just a bit as she looked back up at him. She snapped it shut after a moment and then asked, “Would you really? All of it?”

“Of course,” he replied, nodding confidently. "I had to do everything I did.”

It wasn’t the first time he spoke of The Plan since its execution, but it was the first time speaking of it to her, so the words felt sticky and thick on his tongue, unwilling to come out.

“You used me, Michael,” she stated, sounding more hurt than angry, and he wondered how long she had been harboring such feelings. They’d probably been there all along, he realized with a start. “You used me, and you lied to me, and you cost me my job – hell, my whole _life!_ ”

“But we have a life!” he shot back. “We have a new life here, together. Isn’t that – doesn’t that count for anything?”

“It’s not – I’m not saying I – ” she struggled for words and twisted the sleeve of her shirt in her fist. “You’re my husband, Michael,” she finally continued, softer now. “And our whole relationship is based on a mountain of lies.”

It sounded poetic enough to have been practiced, and his stomach dropped, his chest filling with dread. She _had_ been thinking this over for a while.

“You’ve always meant more than that to me,” he told her honestly. “It was the position, the prison doctor, access to that room that I factored into my plan, not you.”

“You could’ve told me,” she said, and he shook his head angrily, wanting to laugh at how ridiculous a statement that was. “You _should_ have told me, at least given me the option before things came to such a head so I could make that decision for myself! So I could’ve tried to help you, find some help for Lincoln without breaking the law!”

“And what would you have done?” he asked, just as angry and frustrated as she was. “If I’d told you when I realized you were more than a cog in the wheel, what would you’ve done?” He stared hard at her, and she stared boldly back at him. She didn’t understand, she didn’t understand _him_ or anything he’d done, and a cold realization washed over him. “If you can't answer that then you can't be angry with me. You can't judge me. You can't hate me."

She stared at him for an endless moment; one that felt ten times as long as waiting for a reply to his proposal all those weeks before. She stared and him, and he stared back, unable to breathe while he waited for her to take her turn and say something back.

“Sometimes I really think I do,” she said finally, and turned to pad quietly up to their bedroom.

He didn’t follow her. He remained standing where he was beside the bookshelf, moving only to grasp onto it with one hand as he felt in danger of falling over. He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, but too many issues swept out of the way had suddenly and inevitably found their way into the open through what seemed to start out as nothing.

They didn’t speak throughout the next day, but he considered the sandwich she made for him around dinnertime a sign that she was no longer angry with him. At least not the way she had been the night before.

He knew, however, that a sandwich wasn’t enough to bridge the vast space between them. They could still be happy, he was sure of it – all of them, Lincoln and L.J. included. But not like this. This wasn’t right; he understood now. And it was that evening, a day after the fight with her, that he began to construct a new plan for their lives in his head.

\--

Three days later, three days of uttering the briefest of sentences to her husband and sleeping alone in their bed, Sara would wander downstairs to find the couch unslept upon. She would glance curiously around her living room and feel it more cold and empty than usual.

And then she would notice the note tacked to the center of the coffee table, written out in the familiar scrawl of her husband, one that she had come to recognize so well from the dozens of notes and cranes sent to her over the days following his escape. Beside it would be an envelope and a small crane constructed out of blue paper.

 _I’m sorry,_ it would say. Over and over, as if he had to write it at least a dozen times before it became true. _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I wish I could do this in a better way._ She suspected that he was scared – had he tried to do this in person, he’d never really go through with it. _I wish there was something else that could be done. But I have to go. None of this was right, Sara, and you have to know that too._ She did know that. She wasn’t sure when the realization came, or if she’d ever consciously acknowledged it at all, but as she held the letter in her hands she suddenly was sure of it – she never did love Michael, and he never loved her either.

 _I need to go. I need to figure everything out with my brother and my nephew. I didn’t realize before, but freedom isn’t enough; pretending things are fine isn’t enough._ Finally, now that he was gone, they were agreeing on something. She’d thought, way back when they were still all caught in the midst of excitement and chaos, twisting about in the pull of this new life, that caring about him, liking him, wanting him was enough for her. Her real life had been the farthest thing from her mind and there was too much to occupy herself with to really consider whether or not she wanted to spend the rest of her life here, with Michael, or whether they were actually right for each other.

The letter went on, a full page of apologies and Michael telling her how much he cared for her, but that his brother and his nephew would always come first, before anything, and that he could never, ever be truly sorry for lying to her for them. He wrote that he would always care about her and wanted her to be happy, but they wouldn’t be happy together.

He didn’t tell her where they’d gone, but she wasn’t surprised. She was no longer a factor in his life; no longer a factor in his _plans,_ so she no longer needed to know anything about them. It had been going on since they got married – or really, since they met – and was one reason among thousands that she was sure they would have eventually killed each other had Michael stayed.

She opened the envelope to find a stack of cash, surely more than half of his share of Westmoreland’s money. A lot of money. Hers now, the only reimbursement for a destroyed life and lost family.

She sat on the coffee table with the envelope full of money on her lap and stared off into the future, hoping that Michael was doing the same.

 **-end-**


End file.
